Sarah Cypher

American geography is often simplified into two colors along state lines, but Nobel laureate Toni Morrison returns to our variegated past in her new novel, “A Mercy.” The moveable feast of Native American, Dutch, French, Spanish, English and parochial territories is at once alien and intimate, for here is the primordial muck of commerce from which our country evolved.

The year is 1690, and Jacob Vaark is an orphan-made-good as a New World trader. A plantation owner asks him to accept one of his slaves as partial payment on a debt, which Vaark refuses until the cook begs him to take her young daughter. This act is the novel’s eponymous mercy. Vaark and his wife, Rebekka, have lost all their children in infancy, and young Florens joins the homestead as a replacement child. Two other “strays” live there, too: Lina, the lone survivor of a smallpox epidemic, and Sorrow, a pregnant and mentally unsound survivor of a shipwreck. “They were orphans, each and all,” Lina says.

Read more. (From The Oregonian, November 14, 2008.)

Couched in the drama of a young middle-class family in Seattle is one of those stories that may earn its place next to Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist,” and Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi.”

Garth Stein’s third novel, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” (Harper, $23.95, 336 pages), is a fable with a heart. Like its best-selling brethren, it casts a sleeping spell on the readers’ native cynicism and persuades us to dust off old questions about faith and humankind’s better traits.

Read more. (From The Oregonian, May 8, 2008.)

All reviews are published in The Oregonian. More to be scanned and posted soon–check back!

The Mercy Papers, Robin Romm. (January 2009)

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie. (June 2008)

The Translator, Daoud Hari. (April 2008)

A Free Life, Ha Jin. (November 2007)

The Stylist, Cai Emmons. (October 2007)

A Man of No Moon, Jenny McPhee. (September 2007)

Four Seasons in Rome, Anthony Doerr. (June 2007)

The Mistress’s Daughter, AM Homes. (March 2007)

The Communist’s Daughter, Dennis Bock. (February 2007)

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. (May 2006)

Seeing, Jose Saramago. (April 2006)

Digging to America, Anne Tyler. (April 2006)

Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta. (February 2006)

The Family Daughter, Maile Meloy. (February 2006)

Correcting the Landscape, Marjorie Kowalski Cole. (January 2006)

Memories of my Melancholy Whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (November 2005)

The Widow of the South, Robert Hicks. (September 2005)

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson. (November 2004)

A Garden of Earthly Delights, Joyce Carol Oates. (May 2003)

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